Former leading New Zealand publisher and bookseller, and widely experienced judge of both the Commonwealth Writers Prize and the Montana New Zealand Book Awards, talks about what he is currently reading, what impresses him and what doesn't, along with chat about the international English language book scene, and links to sites of interest to booklovers.

Friday, January 11, 2013

Paragraph launches an aggregated lit mag for the iPad age

A new iPad magazine called Paragraph Shorts curates the “best short stories” from across the web and presents them in a Flipboard-like interface. The free app aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise.

Paragraph, a New York-based startup that provides a range of digital author services like apps, released the first issue of its new weekly short story iPad magazine, Paragraph Shorts, on Thursday.

Paragraph Shorts is a little like a Flipboard for short stories, but rather than an algorithm, it uses humans to find short stories — in text, video and audio formats — across the web (from outlets like The New Yorker, The Paris Review and The Moth), then aggregates them and distributes them through a free iPad app. When a Paragraph Shorts reader flips his or her iPad to landscape mode, social features appear, including the Twitter and Facebook streams of the stories’ authors and the magazines they were published in.Paragraph Shorts aims to add value through curation, introducing readers to authors and publications they might not have known about otherwise. “By curating the best short stories, and offering them to people who might not have known they existed, Paragraph will create a link between great literary magazines and readers who are eager to kill fifteen minutes in a quality manner,” Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, said in a statement.More at paidContent